So I’m not gonna lie: I used readcomicsonline for this site. A lot. And now it’s gone. So that’s… kind of a problem. But I do have a scanner so I’m still able to show Requiem for a Goblin (Amazing Spider-Man #1000, written by JM DeMatteis and illustrated by Humbert Ramos) to you at least. I don’t know what I’m going to do when it comes to getting pictures of older comics.

But anyway. I was eagerly awaiting ASM #1000 because, well, it’s the THOUSANDTH and also because it has DeMatteis writing a Harry story again! And here is that Harry story.

We open at Harry’s funeral. Now Harry’s funeral was originally in the Maximum Carnage storyline – Spider-Man Unlimited #1 written by Tom DeFalco – and we do get a look into Peter’s thoughts then.

This story elaborates on them.

Turns out this isn’t the real funeral yet! Peter is just dreaming about Harry leaping out of his coffin and strangling him.

There’s the famous “gotcha!”

Peter wakes up with MJ at his side. It’s the day of the funeral and he’s a mess.

He can’t reconcile Harry with the Goblin. On the one hand that was his friend… on the other hand that was a cackling monster. How can he go to the funeral?

But he does go the funeral and there’s Liz, with her bro Molten Man (interestingly not in golden form like he is in the original depiction of Harry’s funeral.)

I don’t know if anyone really knew what to do with Liz in the immediate aftermath of Harry’s death. Misery establishes that she felt relief, which is totally fair. But she gets little more than a cameo here.

These panels do (accidentally?) raise an interesting question though. Did Liz think Harry and MJ were having an affair?! I mean, it’s definitely a reasonable conclusion for her to come to, right?

Peter leaves the funeral without a word to his wife, and webslings his way to Harry’s old lair. There he imagines… or maybe actually sees, who knows… Harry’s ghost.

Harry’s ghost is self-deprecating.

The masks come off, and the elephant in the room comes up: their painful childhoods. So who should show up but Norman himself?

You can’t have a Harry story without Norman. Here he points out that the cycle of abuse has continued for generations, and Harry had no hope of stopping it.

Norman’s own childhood abuse has been discussed many a time, for example in Cycles and Circles and Gold Goblin.

Ghost Harry tries to hold Peter back from attacking Norman, which raises many questions.

And there’s the rest of the questions. Was Harry a monster or a man? What could have stopped him being that way? Peter doesn’t have any answers…

…he just knows he loved Harry. And that’ll have to be enough.